By Evan Ackerman14 Apr 2015 15:20 GMTYou Can Launch This Quadrotor by Throwing It in the Air

I’ll bet you thought that launching a drone by placing it on a level surface, standing back, and commanding it to take off was about as easy as it got, right? Wrong. Forget about level surfaces, forget about standing back, and just pick up your quadrotor and throw it. It’ll be fine!

The great thing about this is that it doesn’t require GPS or infrared tracking or motion capture or any other localization system. All you need is a smartphone-type processor, an IMU (gyro and accelerometer), a small downward-looking monochrome camera, and an infrared time-of-flight range sensor. Lots of other drones stabilize themselves using downward-looking cameras, but that only works if the robot can see the ground unblurrily enough to extract features from the image (and good luck trying to do that right after you’ve been tossed into the air).

What’s unique about this approach—developed by University of Zurich researchers led by Davide Scaramuzza—is that it takes place in several different stages, with the first one being autonomous state estimation from the onboard sensors, followed by the controller guiding the quadrotor towards a stable hover. Once the quadrotor is horizontal, it stabilizes its altitude, and then it can start using its camera to look for features beneath it to lock into a stationary position. Of course, it has to do all of that very fast.

Throwing a quadrotor to demonstrate this technology is a very compelling demo, but it’s not really what this research is all about: it’s much more general, and therefore much more useful. The goal here (and it seems like they succeeded) is to be able to “automatically recover and stabilize a quadrotor from any initial condition.” In robotics, being able to say “any” in that context is a very notable thing, although I have a sneaking suspicion that what they really mean is “any within reason,” because otherwise I’d try just chucking that quadrotor at the nearest tree as hard as I possibly could. Take that, algorithms!

Putting the whims of abusive journalists aside, this research will come in particularly handy when managing the navigation failures that are sure to occur as quadrotors start exploring the world autonomously in commercial contexts. Loss of GPS signals, interference from all sorts of things, and random sensing or computing freakouts are inevitable, and we need ways of managing failures besides just equipping all pedestrians with protective Kevlar umbrellas.

“Automatic Re-Initialization and Failure Recovery for Aggressive Flight with a Monocular Vision-Based Quadrotor,” by M. Faessler, F. Fontana, C. Forster, and D. Scaramuzza, will be presented next month at ICRA 2015 in Seattle. You can read a preprint of the paper here.

[ Robotics and Perception Group ]

Thanks Davide!

把飞行器扔到空中就可以启动它

由Evan ackerman14 Apr 2015 15:20 gmtyou可以推出这个旋翼扔在air
我&rsquo；打赌你认为发动无人机袭击放在水平面上，站在后面，并采取了指挥是很容易得到的，对吗？错误。忘记水平面，忘记站在后面，就拿起你的旋翼扔。 ；它&rsquo；会好的！< / P > < P > < / P > < P > < / P >
伟大的事，这是不是'；不需要GPS  ；或红外跟踪或运动捕捉或其他定位系统。所有你需要的是一个智能型处理器，IMU（陀螺和加速度计 ；），一个小向下看黑白电视摄像机和红外测距传感器，飞行时间。其他无人机大量稳定自己使用向下的摄像头，但只有当机器人可以看到地面unblurrily足以从图像特征提取（好运试图做的，是在你'；已经抛到空中）。

什么&rsquo；s关于这种方法&mdash独特；苏黎世大学研究人员由Davide斯卡拉穆扎&mdash发达；是以在几个不同的地方，与第一个从机载传感器自治状态估计，其次是控制器引导向一个稳定悬停旋翼。一旦旋翼是水平的、稳定的高度，然后 ；它可以开始使用相机来寻找特征下锁在一个固定的位置。当然，它要做的这一切很快。

投掷旋翼证明这种技术是一个非常引人注目的演示，但它是不是真的；这项研究是关于：它&rsquo；的更普遍，因此更有用。这里的目标（看来他们成功了）是能够 ；&ldquo；自动恢复和稳定旋翼从任何初始条件。&rdquo；的机器人，可以说&ldquo；不&rdquo；在这种情况下， ；是一个非常值得注意的事，虽然我有一种预感，他们真正的意思是&ldquo；任何的理由&rdquo；因为 ；否则我&rsquo；D尝试夹紧，旋翼在最近的树因为我可能会很难。采取的，算法！< / P >

把率性辱骂记者之外，本研究将是特别有用当管理是确保为四旋翼飞行器开始探索世界的自主导航在商业环境中发生的故障。GPS信号的损失，从各种各样的事情干扰和随机检测或计算freakouts是不可避免的，我们需要管理的失败方式除了配备所有行人保护防弹伞。

&ldquo；自动重新初始化和积极的飞行与基于单目视觉的飞行器，”故障恢复；通过 ；M. Faessler，F.丰塔纳，C.福斯特D.斯卡拉穆扎，将于下个月在西雅图ICRA 2015。你可以在这里阅读的论文预印本。

[机器人和知觉组 ；】 ；< / P >

谢谢大卫！< /对